Thursday, November 19, 2009
Older gear
Becoming more knowledgeable about the paraphrenalia of getting old. So yesterday, FIL goes along to the hospital to be issued with two shiny new hearing aids, price, it seems, about £2,000 each. Got to puzzling how one could charge so much for something which is about one cubic centimetre in volume. Then started to think that in that cubic centimetre it had to contain a microphone, some sort of specialised chip, a loudspeaker, a battery and a four way switch big enough for older fingers to work. Off, on normal, on with background exclusion and loop. Which starts to sound like quite a tall order. Presumably it is like watches used to be, the dearer the smaller. Next thought was that back in the olden days hearing aids were cream plastic boxes which you put in your pocket or hung around your neck, connected to your ear by a long twisted pair with an ear plug on the end. The cream plastic box about the size of one of those boxes you keep soap in when you are on holiday and do not trust your hotel to supply usable soap. Personally, never been very keen on those very small hard bars of soap that you get in the cheaper hotels. The dinkily wrapped jobs from Floristarnia of Jermyn Street (established 1858) in the better hotels not much better. Given the way that technology has moved on I imagine that you could supply the functionality actually supplied in one cubic centimetre in 50 cubic centimetres for a fraction of the price. With a bigger more finger friendly switch. Maybe inversely pro-rata on volume, say £40. Given also that people of age are usually not that fussed about their appearance or shy about admitting that they are deaf, wouldn't the large size box be better value for money?
The next item is one of those electrified contraptions like a roller towel for helping you in and out of the bath. We have a nearly new one from a company called Aquasoothe, costing in excess of £1,000 when it was new a year or so ago. Well made thing. Lots of stainless steel inside and well finished. Battery about 2 inches by 2 inches by 10 inches packs a remarkable amount of power and holds its charge. But the second-hand value of the thing seems to be close to zero. There were three or four of them on E-bay when I looked, bids mainly in the £5 area - although I grant they might shoot up as the deadline nears. Then on another site called http://www.asksid.org.uk/ there were rather more of them, mostly offered for free. Now I can see that for a personal item of this sort about which one is a bit uncomfortable anyway, one might prefer new. And if you buy from new you get installation and after sales soothing. But for considerations of that sort to a make an as-new one virtually valueless seems terribly wasteful. Not very ecological at all.
The usually sensible National Gallery seems to have stepped into a pile of conceptual art tripe (or perhaps manure would be the better metaphor), having installed a life size replica of the street of sleeze in Amsterdam, complete with life size models of the ladies, in the basement. This is intended to provide a stimulating and shocking counterpoint to the tarts, rapes and what-have-you portrayed in the posh pictures upstairs. Complete twaddle. How is it that otherwise grown-up and mature art experts keep falling for keeping up and in with this tripe? Why is it thought a virtue to shock us? I might like a lot of the pictures in the National Gallery, but not because they shock. And anyway, how can a much loved picture which one has spent hours with, shock. Neither likely nor necessary. Why is it thought a virtue to shake me out of my comfort zone? The whole point of comfort zones is that they are comfortable and everybody can see the boundaries.
On a different tack, rather surprised by the amount of advertising just presently for very violent computer games. So yesterday, for example, came across a large advertisement at Waterloo for the rogue god of war (or something). Intriguing that on the one hand there should be much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the press about knives and guns while on the other we are fully up for the synthetic version. But then, who is to say whether the synthetic version satisfies the urge to violence or stimulates it? Not aware of any serious evidence either way. I suspect that it all depends. With some people in some circumstances it satisfies, with other people in other circumstances it stimulates. I offer two examples, one in each direction. First, the Japanese have been very keen on very violent comic books for decades but have been relatively non-violent in real life for those same decades. They were, I believe, rather violent for real before that. Second, our Saxon forebears used to pass the time in the pub telling each other stories about gory valiant deeds, their own and those of their forebears. Part of this was boasting but another part was exhortory. In the morning I would be moved to go out and try to go one better. To be fair, they did not have much in the way of synthetic alternatives in those days.
# posted by Jim @ 3:35 AM 
